With new technology being rolled out regularly, we designers have a fantastic opportunity to use new tools and methods to improve the products we create for mobile experiences. This is our time to marry content, personalization, voice interactions, microinteractions, and video to produce unique experiences that will attract and impress users for years to come.

With 2018 well underway, I’d like to review five important experience trends that are bound to make a deep impact this year and will likely continue to define the way in which apps are developed in the years ahead.

1. Being Content-Centered

Our clients often look to us for the most effective means of distributing their content in a way that services the users and provides the client with reliable and quality data.

“Time is of the essence” has never been a truer statement. Users have super-short attention spans (Hubspot reports only about 8 seconds or so) that shrink more every year. Seconds matter – so while design can be pretty, more importantly, it needs to be purposeful. If we aren’t designing to make the content the most important aspect of each screen, then we are failing our clients and most importantly, users.

While designing around content that has yet to be provided is far from ideal, there are a few workarounds. You can always default to the popular Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, or you could try using the content that’s being replaced from your client’s current site, create your own, or borrow from a competitor’s site.

By using text and color as interactive design elements, you can strategically create quick, vibrant, and delightful user experiences that expedite the user’s journey with a content-centered experience. Keep it simple. You don’t want to overwhelm your users with too much information.

This insurance app does a great job of displaying multiple options in a visually simple way, both in a tab and main menu format.

Image Credit: Nimasha Perara

2. Personalization

Personalization is one of the most frequently requested features in user interviews. Weather content, design, or navigation, users like to feel connected with the user interface. If there’s a pattern of disconnect, they will likely not want to return, especially given a user’s ever-shrinking attention span.

Personalization can be achieved in a number of ways, including:

Enabling cookies on websites to remember what users prefer on your site

Implementing location tools on mobile to remind users of their interests

Incorporating the seasons or holidays to create a user experience that feels current and relative, and allowing users to create profiles to customize their experience.

More often than not, people are more inclined to share negative experiences than positive ones, so it is imperative that we are creating a more intuitive experience for our users. If users feel a connection with a website or app, they will want to return and hopefully share their positive experiences.

The animation below highlights one of Shockoe’s latest customizable interfaces for a banking application. We helped create a mobile experience that allowed members to customize which cards they land on first, allowing users to get their most important information faster.

3. Voice Interaction

There is no denying the impact that Siri, Alexa, and Google have made on our usability. My seven-year-old daughter chats up Alexa regularly — asking for songs, to make animal noises, and even a few weeks back, asked if she was married! I find this to be a testament to what next-generation interaction looks like and the importance of adopting it sooner rather than later.

Over 30 million households now have voice interaction tools, which is incredible! The rise of voice interaction will undoubtedly drive the increase of designing without an interface. Good UX seeks the path of least resistance, and voice interaction certainly bypasses any friction that may have existed in a physical UI.

When designing for voice interactions, experienced designers will need to to take into account many new considerations. Providing users with suggestions may help alleviate confusion when the system doesn’t understand the command or cannot produce the desired result. For example, you could have a retail app say: “You can ask to order shoes or browse shoes.” You should also consider providing the user with an easy way out by offering “leave” as an option.

Is the mic even on? Users will need to know when the AI they’re chatting with is paying attention and when there might be a problem.

Image Credit: Juan C. Angustia

4. Microinteractions

Engaging with microinteractions is one of my favorite things when using an app. Microinteractions are simply subtle design effects based around completing a task. These tiny interactions bring a level of delight to a user experience. If implemented correctly, these in-app gestures and animations can reduce design clutter, increase intuitiveness, and make interaction almost seamless. Fewer buttons on a screen mean more focused content, and we all know that having the right content, is king.

Medium has a controversial “clapping” interaction, as an alternative way to “like” an article you’ve read. Love them or hate them, these tiny claps with fireworks are both silly and cute enough to have caused a plethora of blog posts both praising and cursing the change from “likes” to “claps”. Humans inherently hate change, so it’s not surprising that bloggers took to the Internet to vent about this change, just as they did with Instagram’s iconic logo change a few years back. Change is sometimes a necessary evil — it’s where great ideas stem from. I for one applaud medium for taking the bold step to attempt to improve usability.

With microinteractions, there is an opportunity to bridge the gap between the user and the app through fun and satisfying actions that leave users emotionally content – they help engage users to interact with tasks intuitively, like express appreciation with likes or favorites, navigate sites with subtle animated transitions, or filling out form fields with hint text.

Predictive microinteractions can provide directive animations to assist users with onboarding, making it more delightful and ultimately, less confusing

Image Credit: Leo Zakour

5. Fullscreen & Vertical Video

In 2017, the use of videos surged as a marketing medium. Hubspot reports that 81% of businesses utilized videos as a marketing tool and nearly 100% of those businesses say they’ll continue to do so in 2018. 65% of the businesses that didn’t use videos in 2017 say they are planning to in 2018.

Words are important, but with videos, users are able to experience a more interactive form of content while also consuming more information in a shorter amount of time. This is another form of putting content front and center in a way that doesn’t force users to scroll. With AR and VR becoming more common, a full-screen video will inevitably become the norm, providing users with a more immersive: personally-impactful experience that will give them more of an emotional connection. When users are immersed in another person’s experience, be it skiing the slopes, walking in an impassioned protest, exploring caves, or learning a new DIY project, they are bound to have a richer and deeper connection with the content.

As video content infiltrates our favorite sites and apps, users tend to keep their mobile devices in portrait mode, rather than turning them horizontally for a full-width view. According to LukeW, 94% of users view their content in portrait mode, while only 6% view content in landscape mode, thus the obvious need to provide users with the option to view all content, including video, in portrait mode.

Apple’s new Clip app offers users fullscreen AR selfies similar to Snapchat’s World Lenses. Mashable reports that Clip will offer an animated 360° scene that you can experience by moving the camera around.

Image Credit: Apple

Facebook Live Video. Image Credit Buzzfeed

Other Experience Trend Shoutouts

Since I couldn’t list every single popular experience trend to look for in 2018 and beyond, I wanted to at least show some love to a couple more experiences worth mentioning.

AR and VR

Quickly evolving into affordable and viable options for both enterprises and consumers. Whether you’re looking for augmented/virtual entertainment or augmented/virtual training, this medium has yet to surface its full potential. As AR and VR continue to find great ubiquity and user acceptance, think about how this technology could advance the medical, construction, aeronautics, and engineering fields in the years ahead.

Biometrics

It may seem new, and it sort of is, but since Apple released the iPhone X’s biometric face identification feature, it appears the bar has risen in security authentication. Fingerprint authorization is now common in comparison. Biometrics will continue to innovate and demand designers and developers to push the envelope when considering the user’s privacy and security concerns. Designers will need to keep in mind the willingness of their users to participate in the functionality and devs will need to remember that biometrics don’t protect against passcodes or tokens being shared. They’re simply new ways for users to gain access to their data without being too inconvenienced with passcode interruptions.

No industry has more hype attached to it than tech. Sure, the entertainment industry is known as hype-a-palooza, but they rely on technology to both create and hype their products, so we’ll stick with tech as the most hyped vertical on the planet.

How does someone figure out what’s really worth it, and what’s the latest shiny object that’s really just a tin can?

Great minds spend great big chunks of time and money thinking about this very question. Gartner releases an annual Hype Cycle report that looks at tech trends and predicts what their adoption and long tail might be.

Their predictions for 2012 are in the chart below. You can see that most of where we operate here at Shockoe is already on the Slope of Enlightenment.

Here are our Three Tech Trends of Truth that rise above the hype-noise:

#1: Tech that connects emotionally

A great example of this is apps that deal with food. Our owniYummiapp takes advantage of this by letting users share their favorite food across their entire social sphere. Angry Birds is another app that uses emotion – it lets users kill mustachioed pigs to blow off some steam. Instagram has an emotional component, too, in that images can have a significant emotional impact. Technology is a human tool, and humans are emotional creatures. Tech that touches human emotion will trend … forever.

#2: Education 2.0

Tech that helps students self-direct learning is coming on strong, and will continue to do so. We’re educators here at Shockoe, and we know from our experience teaching mobile development that learning face-to-face is the best way to acquire some skill-sets. However, there is plenty of room for self-directed education in primary, secondary and university programs, and that idea is starting to gain traction. Legendary tech investor Vinod Khosla posted some of his thoughts on this on Techcrunch last month. A favorite quote:

according to research by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, 60 percent of the top-selling iPhone apps on the education store are made for toddlers and preschoolers. Do we expect these children to relinquish and forget their app- and game-centered development after they get to first grade? This is completely unreasonable! And for me it is easy to envision how we can make education more engaging with these approaches, hence enhancing learning at all levels be it kindergarten or medical school.

#3: Near Field Communication will change money forever

We talked about this two weeks ago in our post on mobile trends. Mobile payment tech turned Africa into a mobile-payments case study, spring-boarding off the M-Pesa launch in 2007 by wireless provider Safaricom. Now a number of banks in the US and Europe are giving NFC-enabled mobile payments and banking a test drive. The early adopters among banks will be the winners in this race. Those in late will become the also-rans, losing increasingly-mobile customers in all geographic areas to the more mobile-friendly financial institutions.